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Luca hadn’t shown up to practice again.
Second day in a row, almost a hat-trick in no-shows. No-one had so much as heard a peep from him. Not one explanatory text, not so much as an emoji reaction in the group chat. And yeah, shit happened. Rookies got a little over-confident of their alcohol tolerance at bars, decided to play into the teenage rebel of it all to and play truant. They’d all been there. Normal behaviour for teens with too many zeros in their bank account, unsupervised and miles from home. Whatever.
But it would be seriously out of character for Luca. Luca, who usually showed up early to everything like he was hoping Ilya would stick a little gold star on his jersey for it. Who wore nerdy glasses off the ice like hockey’s answer to Clark Kent. Who had famously been ID-ed for an 18A movie more than once. Who blushed if anyone so much as mentioned dating around him.
And Ilya might be rapidly sinking himself, one-way ticket to the bottom of the fucking Mariana Trench, might be dragging himself to therapy once a week, might be choking his way through cereal every morning like he was trying to down a bowl of maggots, but he was still captain. And that no-show was still a rookie he felt responsible for.
So, he drove to Luca’s apartment after practice, even though he was beat and wanted to rot in his bed until Shane called in the evening. Because it was the right thing to do, because he wasn’t a heartless bastard, because he was quite fond of Luca and was actually getting worried.
Luca rented a small studio, a one room and one bathroom affair out on the north side of town. He’d wanted to live by himself, even though there had been enough guys willing to billet him or put him up with their relatives if he needed it. The original plan had been to throw him into a flat share with one of their sophomore guys, who was Czech. Not quite the same, but the guy was also young, also naïve and also an ocean away from home. Should have been a win-win for everyone. But Luca had declined it. Politely, obviously, with enough apologies thrown in to ensure everyone definitely knew he felt real fucking bad about it.
Ilya knew the address, because he made it his business to know where everyone lived. Captain shit, nosy bastard shit. The building was sleek, modern, all sharp edges and big square windows that were probably all fun and games until they needed cleaned. He parked down the street. Walked the two hundred metres to the door and rang at the bell labelled Haas in all caps.
No response.
Ilya sighed and thumbed his way through his contacts until he landed on Luca’s. It was fucking cold out and he hadn’t exactly been planning on this wellness-check of a side quest, so he wasn’t dressed appropriately. The snow was already soaking through the toes of his trainers, fingers were already red from the exposure, and he’d only been outside for a few minutes.
The phone rang. The went to voicemail.
Something in rapid-fire Swiss German, because, apparently, the idiot hadn’t thought to change it to a language anyone else on the team could make heads or tails of. Ilya knew a word or two in German, mainly swearwords he’d overheard during the matchups at Worlds while he was in juniors, but Swiss German was a whole other thing and he wasn’t touching it. Trying to scrape together some French was bad enough without throwing something else into the mix as well. Besides, Haas spoke annoyingly flawless English. So, it wasn’t like it was a linguistic issue.
He called again. Voicemail.
Third try, fingers heading into frostbite territory, and finally Luca picked up.
“Hello?”
Fucking finally.
“Haasy, open the door. Is fucking cold out here.”
Silence. The awkward, breath holding kind, then panicked rustling in the background. Ilya tapped his finger impatiently on the doorbell, listened to the distorted sounds of Luca stumbling around in his apartment, then shouldered his way inside when the door was finally buzzed open.
“Third floor, yes?” he asked, taking in the neat row of letterboxes by the door, the stupid fake plant lurking by the doormat. He would never understand the Canadian obsession with plastic greenery. No matter how much it cost, it always looked sad. Seemingly, it was infectious, because Galina had several of the things haunting her office. He’d probably be purchasing one any day now.
“Yeah, um-“
Ilya hung up. Took the stairs, because Shane was always saying it was the easiest way to get a few extra steps in and he’d gotten into Ilya’s head about it.
Luca was waiting in the doorway when Ilya reached the third floor. He looked, honestly, like shit. Rumpled black Ottawa shirt and matching shorts, bare feet. Hair sticking up six ways to Sunday and glasses sitting squint on his nose. There was a large red mark on his face that let Ilya know without asking he’d been horizontal in bed for a while. He was clutching his phone like Ilya was going to take it from him or whack him over the head with. Anxious looking as ever, except now he also looked scared shitless.
Ilya shouldered past him and into the apartment. Toed off his damp trainers. Luca silently closed the door behind him, and they both wordlessly examined the space. Like they were in an art gallery in front of a painting neither of them understood but needed to come up with a witty observation about.
Ilya hadn’t been over much, but he had had Luca pegged as a tidy kind of guy. Something about the way he always took notes on his iPad in tape review and how he always had his own labelled water bottle at games while the rest of them shared spit, sweat and God knows what else from the communal ones. His hotel rooms were usually so neat he could give Shane a run for his money. Luca owned fucking packing cubes, what other conclusions was Ilya supposed to draw?
The apartment they were both looking at wasn’t exactly tidy. The bed, shoved into the far corner like an afterthought, was a mess of rumpled sheets and pillows. Miscellaneous hockey equipment piled up on the grey couch, a stick or three poking out of the mess of pads and jerseys like swords out of a body. A vacuum cleaner peered out from behind one of the armchairs, like it wasn’t sure why it wasn’t yet back in the storage cupboard it normally lived in. The kitchen on the far side looked fine at first glance but Ilya could see the dishes peeking out of the sink, like they were embarrassed. The whole thing was a scene from Ilya’s own life, and it was not one he wanted Luca lingering in any longer than necessary.
He turned to Luca, wanted to say something stupid to lighten the rapidly sobering mood just a tad, but the second their eyes met Luca burst into tears. Full on sobbing, hands immediately flying up to cover his face like it would do a damn thing to hide what was happening.
Shit.
“Sorry,” he choked out, and none of that, Ilya thought grimly. No one would be apologising for their tears on his watch.
“Hug?” he asked, softly, holding out his arms. “I think you need one.”
Luca nodded shakily, shoulders already up and getting acquainted with his ears. Ilya wrapped his arms around him. Tight. Rubbed comforting little circles between his shoulder blades. Shushed and made other soothing noises while Luca cried into his hoodie, occasionally trying to start saying something only for it to come out as a heave and a choked off noise. Guttering apologies that didn’t quite make it to verbalisation.
“Is ok,” Ilya told him gently, over and over, patting him on the shoulder. “Do not be sorry.”
Finally, after what felt like hours, Luca’s sobs began to sound less like they were tearing his ribcage in half. He sniffled wetly into Ilya’s shoulder one last time, then pulled back. Scrubbed across his face with the back of his hand.
“This is so fucking embarrassing,” he hiccupped, wiping at his face a little more frantically like there was any undoing the act of sobbing into his captain’s shoulder. “I’m really sorry-“
“Did you eat yet today?” Ilya interrupted him. From experience, once Luca got on his apology train, it became rather difficult to derail.
Luca shook his head. He really did look terrible, Ilya thought. He wished he’d thought to check on him earlier, before he had worked himself up into the state he was in now.
“Bood told me about this bakery, is near the rink. They have very good carrot cake. I think maybe this is what you need.”
Luca exhaled shakily. Nodded. Fiddled with the sleeve of his shirt like a chastened schoolboy.
“Ok,” he whispered.
Ilya gave him the space to blow his nose and get himself back in order while he ordered delivery from the bakery. Added some fresh bread into the mix, because Luca was always a bit of a snob about the toast hotels offered up as part of their breakfast buffets. He never said it out loud, but his disapproval of white bread was so obvious even Shane would have been able to recognise it no problem. Ilya threw in two coffees, both sweet, because coffee had yet to make anything in his life worse. He knew Luca secretly liked lattes with some kind of syrup, even if he drank it black and sad around the guys because he was just a touch neurotic about blending in with the team. Like he really thought the secret to team chemistry was hidden in bitter practice-rink coffee.
“Will be here in twenty minutes,” he told Luca.
Luca nodded slowly. His glasses were all smeared up with tears, eyes bloodshot and sore-looking from crying.
“Talk to me,” Ilya said softly.
Luca let himself fall on the couch like a sack of potatoes, and Ilya sat down on the armchair opposite. Kept his expression carefully neutral and tried to ignore the obvious and unhelpful parallel to his therapy sessions his brain was throwing out.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he mumbled. “Ever since I got back to Ottawa, I just-“
Broke off to swipe shakily at his eyes again.
It was barely January. Luca had flown home for Christmas; he’d been annoying about it all through the festive period. They’d all chirped him of course, because they only had three days off and Switzerland wasn’t exactly a bus-ride away. Ruffled his hair and called him a mama’s boy. Luca had gone all red and flustered, the way he always did when they ribbed him, but he’d been looking forward to it so much that it was actually kind of sweet. The dots were beginning to link up in Ilya’s head, and the resulting picture was thankfully less alarming than he’d been concerned it might be. It was a relief, if he was honest.
“You miss home,” Ilya stated.
“It’s stupid,” Luca said. “You must think I’m pathetic.”
Ilya shook his head quickly.
“No,” he said genuinely. “Is normal, I think.”
“Was it this hard for you?” Luca asked. “I mean, with Moscow. Did you miss it?”
He flushed a little, clearly embarrassed that he knew exactly where Ilya had grown up. Ilya had no doubt that if he pressed, Luca would name the exact hospital. Maybe even the ward, for good measure. The time it had taken for the hospital to cough up his birth certificate, down to the second. Being admired was all fine and well but sometimes…
“Was different situation, I think,” Ilya told him carefully.
“So no,” Luca said. He dropped his gaze.
Had he missed Moscow? Sometimes, when he had been trapped in a conversation he had understood at most half of, or when he had had to figure out how car insurance worked in America on his own. The moments when he had felt impossibly small and impossibly, unavoidably foreign, keenly aware of his own stumbling sentences and limited vocabulary. His stupid cartoon-villain accent. When the water had somehow tasted different to the water at home, when he had turned on the television and been greeted by programmes, he hadn’t been able to recognise. When the street names had made no sense, when it had felt like he was being thrown to the wolves every time he was shoved out of the locker room for media availability.
But then again, Ilya had had a foot out of the door since his coach had told him he was good enough to play in the MLH one day. Maybe even sooner, maybe since he’d watched his mother be buried on the other side of the city. Had been raring to get out from under his father’s fists and his brother’s insults, had been ready to give up all he’d ever known just to get the fuck away from his family. Eighteen and oh so dumb, betting it all on the off chance that someone on another continent would decide he was a worthwhile investment. His golden ticket, and he had fought tooth and nail for it. Once out of Russia, he’d found the grass greener and smelling sweeter, just as he’d always dreamed it would. Had looked at Shane Hollander’s freckles outside the shitty rink in Regina and known he was doomed to stay.
Luca didn’t need to know that part.
“I cried in a supermarket once,” he told Luca instead.
Luca raised his head and stared at him and, God, Ilya really couldn’t give him much, but he could give him this. It was pretty fucking embarrassing, but if it meant Luca would stop beating himself up about feeling homesick then Ilya would have happily given up every humiliating anecdote from his rookie year.
“There is an eastern European supermarket in Boston. Very small, the owner is Ukrainian, I think. I went there one weekend, because we had lost five games in a row and I felt very sad and alone. They had this tea I like, is a Russian brand. Have not found it here yet. I saw it and then I was crying. A Russian lady gave me a tissue and some chocolate. Very embarrassing.”
He grinned at Luca.
“So, is not just you. Promise.”
Luca smiled weakly at him. It was all wobbly looking, lower lip still trembling a little, but Ilya took it as a good sign, nonetheless. At least he wasn’t crying again.
“I have been to Zurich,” he told Luca. “Very beautiful city.”
“I know you have, for Worlds,” Luca said, and then grinned apologetically when Ilya squinted at him.
He was going to have to look up his own Wikipedia page. There seemed to be far too much information up on it. That or Luca needed to stop haunting the fan pages.
“Tell me about it,” Ilya prompted him. “I want to know your favourite spots.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Ilya was mainly quiet. Listened to Luca talk about the Kunsthaus, which he had visited on a school trip and fallen in love with, to the point that he had bought a yearly pass every year since then. About taking his cousins up Uetliberg in the summers, them complaining the whole walk that their feet hurt and him keeping their spirits up with the promise of ice cream after. About taking the tram to the rink in the mornings before school, accidently whacking the suits on their morning commute in the face with his stick every time he shuffled his feet. About him and his friends packing themselves into a rented car to cross the border into Germany to drink cheap beer. Christmas markets, buying too many mugs of overpriced mulled wine and fried potatoes, revelling in the tinsel-smothered kitsch of it all. ZSC Lions games at the Swiss Life Arena with his grandfather, who’d always wanted him to wear their blue jersey one day. Eating Raclette with his family the day before Christmas, the way they had every year for as long as he could remember, debates about the correct order of potatoes and cheese in the little pans. How his mother always baked way too many Christmas cookies and ended up giving away tins of them to neighbours and friends.
It sounded…nice. And maybe therein lay the difference. Because Ilya’s love for Russia had always felt like the instinctual love an unwanted child could not help but have for its mother. For all it slapped him down whenever he dared to look up, for all it forced him to slice parts of himself off to survive, for all it took and took and took, he still wanted it to adore him. He imagined Switzerland was an easier mother to love. If nothing else, a less complicated one. For Luca’s sake, he dearly hoped so.
When the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of their coffee and cake, Luca was looking considerably better.
The cake was very good, just as he’d promised it would be, and Ilya was glad to see Luca dig in without any hesitation. He felt a little nauseous, the same nauseous he’d been feeling for months, but tried to eat anyway. The cream cheese frosting was perfect, just the right side of sickly, but he might as well have been eating wallpaper paste for all the joy it brought him. He desperately wanted to smoke, had been craving a cigarette since leaving the rink, but pushed it down. Luca probably wouldn’t want him stinking up his living space anyway.
“This is really good,” Luca said. Took a big sip of his coffee.
“Tell Bood,” Ilya told him. “He likes when people follow his recommendations.”
He put down his coffee. Business time. Because nice as it was to hang out with Luca, reminiscing about hometowns over cake and coffee, there was still something he had to clear up. Captain duties and all that. After all, the C wasn’t just his on the ice. Once you had it, you never took that thing off.
“Practice tomorrow,” he said. “I know is early, and I know is optional, but I want to see you there. Yes?”
Luca flushed red as a beetroot but nodded. Fiddled with the paper lid of his drink.
“I’m really sorry for missing two days,” he said quietly. “I just…”
He trailed off awkwardly. Ilya didn’t miss the way his eyes flicked to the bed again, to the messy sheets and pillows. He could picture how those last two days had gone. Hell, he’d spent weeks like that before, body heavy in a way that made getting up and about feel impossible. Ilya could sympathise with how hard it could be to pick up the phone.
“I understand,” Ilya reassured him. “No-one is mad. Worried, a bit, but no-one is upset at you.”
Luca blinked at him from behind his glasses and God he looked so fucking young. Ilya couldn’t recall ever looking that young, even when he’d been an eighteen-year-old rookie in a locker room full of strangers. But Luca was so different to him then, painfully shy where Ilya had been abrasive and brash, withdrawn where Ilya had been extroverted to the point of irritating.
“Next time you feel like this, talk to me,” he said.
“I don’t want to bother you,” Luca mumbled. “This is stupid, and you’re the captain, not my babysitter.”
“Haasy,” Ilya told him seriously. “I am captain and that means it is my job to babysit. You are still little rookie. Is ok, I do not mind.”
For a second, he thought about telling Luca he was seeing a therapist, just to make himself a little more someone who could be confided in and a little less captain of the team. But then he bit it back quick, because Luca had spent years idolising him like he was some untouchable deity with a hockey stick, had dropped Ilya’s name into every Draft interview like Ilya was paying him by the mention. Had accidently revealed that he had had a poster of Ilya on wall of his childhood bedroom and turned a truly spectacular shade of red when he’d realised Ilya had overheard him. There were jokes aplenty about the way Luca followed him around like a lost little duckling during practices. Luca looked at him like he’d invented hockey itself and maybe it was selfish, maybe it was shallow, but Ilya needed that right now.
Plan B then.
“I have an idea,” he mused. “You are new in Ottawa, so am I. Maybe once a week, you and me be tourists. We go to museums maybe, or the canal. We can take the other newbies as well.”
It would be an effort to organise and keep going, but he was captain, wasn’t he? He was supposed to look out for the team and get them to be a coherent group and whatnot. If that meant ferrying a bunch of homesick hockey players around a museum once a week, so be it. He’d even get them a postcard from the giftshop.
“Really?” Luca asked, and he suddenly looked so excited that Ilya was glad he’d put it on the table.
“Really,” Ilya said. “Will be good for me too.”
It would be. Most of his time in the city so far had been spent bouncing between the rink and his too-big house like the world’s saddest ping-pong ball, with the occasional drop-in with Yuna and David. He genuinely liked the rookies, and it would be good for some of the hero-worship to be taken down a peg or five. Shane would like this too, he knew that. He was always on Ilya’s case about rehabbing his image now that no-one was expecting him to single-handedly haul in the cups anymore. He would have to get some recommendations from him about what tourist attractions Ottawa had on offer.
“Ok,” Luca said, grinning widely now, and Ilya just knew that this offer would be in multiple group chats within the hour, probably splayed across some fansite when inevitably someone couldn’t be able to keep their trap shut. Once Harris got word of this, it would be all over Instagram.
“Settled,” Ilya said and held out his hand so that they could shake on it.
“Do you want some help with…”
Ilya trailed off, instead gesturing vaguely to the apartment at large. At the hockey stuff on the couch, the dishes in the kitchen sink, the paper plates off which they were eating.
Luca immediately shook his head, looking a little ill at the thought of Ilya cleaning up his apartment with him.
“No, I got it,” he said quickly. “It’s bad enough you saw it like this.”
“I have seen worse,” Ilya reassured him.
Decided not to mention that the worse had been his own house. Was currently his own house. Complete with plates full of cigarette ash and a vodka bottle or five tucked under the living room table. That was neither here nor there.
He downed the rest of his coffee, grimaced a little when the too-sweet syrup dregs all hit his tongue, and swallowed the last forkful of cake. Stood up and made sure to tuck his chair in under the table, because he hadn’t been raised in a barn.
“OK, I see you tomorrow,” he told Luca. “At eight.”
“I’ll be there,” Luca confirmed, nodding.
“Good,” Ilya said.
Luca trailed behind him as he made his way to the door. Hovered awkwardly while Ilya put his soggy trainers back on.
“Ilya?” Luca said, and Ilya turned to look at him, hand already on the doorhandle.
“Thank you,” he said, painfully sincere from his pale face all the way down to his bare feet. “For coming to check on me.”
Ilya reached across and ruffled his hair, grinning when Luca immediately drew back and out of reach. He wasn’t quite quick enough, but it was an endearing look on him.
“See you tomorrow Haasy,” he said, throwing out a jokey salute before making his way back downstairs.
Somewhere around the first floor, he realised that he’d kind of shot himself in the foot, because now that he’d made Luca promise to show up, he would also have to make it to practice. Eight in the fucking morning. He’d been skipping optional skates for weeks now, the guilt about his failure to show up outweighed by the fact he was counting himself lucky if he managed to get to the mandatory ones on time.
Do it for the rookies, he thought grimly to himself, because God knows they deserved so much more from him than they were currently getting. Be a good fucking example, be a good fucking captain.
Put on a fucking show.